Paper Route: Finding My Way to Precision Journalism

Copyright © 2012 by Philip Meyer

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-8312-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-8311-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-8310-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011962925

iUniverse rev. date: 06/21/2016

Contents

Introduction

1. The land

2. World War I and its effects

3. My arrival and the long disruption

4. The World War II Years

5. High school journalism

6. Off to college

7. Becoming a newspaperman

8. The Topeka Daily Capital

9. The Silent Generation speaks

10. Another war

11. Up in the air, upside down

12. Aboard the USS Pocono

13. The Kansas desk

14. Hark the sound

15. Getting sand in our shoes

16. Becoming an investigative reporter

17. Washington D.C.

18. Escape to Harvard

19. The Detroit riot

20. A year with too much news

21. You’re a sound man.

22. Precision Journalism

23. Executive suite

24. The rest of the story

Endnotes

Illustrations

Jacob and Matilda Meyer, ca 1882

Elmer Bige Meyer, Emporia, 1915

Hilda Grace Morrison, ca 1926

Philip Meyer, Deshler, 1931

After the tornado, July 4, 1932

Bige with Phil, ca 1932

Ernie and Wilmer Morrison, Ft. Benning, 1943

John and Philip Meyer, 1944

Mae Morrison, 1945

Phil Meyer as college freshman, 1948

Meyer with Pontiac, a K-State junior in 1951

As battalion bugler, 1952

At Whiting Field, 1953

Sue Quail, 1954

The Morrison farmhouse, ca 1961

Lester Pap Meyer and farmhouse, 1961

Introduction

A t interdisciplinary faculty gatherings, the conversation often led to comparisons of research interests. When I mentioned mine, which was also the title of my first book, there was, more than once, a witty response.

"Precision Journalism? That’s an oxymoron!"

Once, to break the tension, someone asked what else I had written, and I had to purse my lips and say:

"Ethical Journalism."

My last academic book was about fixing the broken business model of daily newspapers, and I was tempted to call it Profitable Journalism, thus establishing an oxymoron trilogy. But someone wisely talked me out of it.

Such are the risks one takes when trying to be an innovator. I was an early adopter of scientific method applied to reporting the news. Bad idea, I was told at the time. A reporter should ask scientists about their results, not try to use their methods to make conclusions on his or her own. But computers and statistical software were making it easier, and I did not have to step too far outside the box to see the possibilities for journalism.

Thinking outside the box is easier when you have lived there. Digging into family history late in life, I discovered that I come from a long line of outsiders. My Swiss ancestors were members of a tiny and unpopular religious sect called the Antonianers, after their leader Anton Unternaehrer, who died in a Lucerne prison in 1823. They were antinomians, a peculiar subset of Protestants who believed that accepting Christ as one’s savior took all the pressure away from any need to follow rules, either God’s or man’s. In their view, Jesus was a fixer, and they could do whatever they wanted. They liked to cite Saint Paul, who said in his first letter to the Corinthians, The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

Antinomianism appeared around the time of the Reformation, encouraged by some of Martin Luther’s unguarded reflections, and it surfaced in America in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anne Hutchinson led a rising merchant class that wanted freedom to pursue its economic interests, unfettered by civil and religious authority. I’m not sure why it gained traction in Switzerland in the early 19th century, but the disruption of the Industrial Revolution surely had something do with it. My people were farmers, and they prized their independence. The industrial system demanded coordination and regimentation to enable production on a large scale.

There is little evidence that observing Unternaehrer’s creed led to a great deal of risqué behavior by my Meyer ancestors, although the meticulous records kept by the Swiss show that my great-grandparents, Heinrich and Regula Meyer, were first cousins and that their firstborn arrived two months after their 1843 marriage in Zurich. They named the child after his father, and Henry Meyer Jr., as he became known in this country, was the first of his immediate family to abandon Switzerland for America. He reached Kansas in 1863. Heinrich and Regula followed him to Kansas a year later with their remaining children, including seven-year-old Jacob, who became my grandfather.

In the USA, the Meyers left no sign of their antinomianism. They joined congregations of the Evangelical Association of North America, founded to serve German-speaking Protestants, and followed a pietistic path, free of drinking, dancing, swearing, or violations of the Sabbath. My grandfather would risk crop failure rather than harvest on a Sunday, even if a destructive storm was approaching. He figured the Lord would provide.

The outsider role was apparently more situational than genetic, but accidents of time and geography would, at least in my case, reinforce that sense of otherness. For a journalist, it would prove an advantage.

Jacob and Matilda Meyer, ca 1882

1. The land

W e moved often in the Depression years, and the two farms were the constant in our lives that kept us emotionally anchored. My parents were born in adjoining townships in Washington County, Kan., and they spent all but a few wartime months of their married life no more than one county away from their original family farms. The siblings on both sides had grown and scattered, but each family left a bachelor brother who kept the original farm operating both for his own support and as a resource and refuge for the extended family.

The Meyer farm, in Strawberry Township, was the more prosperous. My Swiss-born grandfather Jacob Meyer acquired its first 120 acres from the original homesteader, Christian Wherley, in 1880, and expanded it by buying two adjoining farms, each 160 acres, the standard size set by the Homestead Act of 1862. Roads in the prairie states are neatly laid out in square-mile sections clearly visible on cross-country flights. Four 160-acre homesteads fit in a section. Twenty-five years after his original purchase, Jacob made the final payment on the third farm, and he owned, debt-fee, 440 contiguous acres of gently rolling fields and pasture with a creek running through the eastern portion. It was called Pete’s Creek, Peats Creek, or Peach Creek, depending on whose map you used. The original Wherley house had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, but Jacob kept adding to it as his family grew to its full complement of eight children. Frank Meyer, born in 1886, a decade before my father, remembered the house as it was when he was a small child:

… a two-room homesteader’s frame house; that is, two rooms on the ground floor and two above, which are still unfinished and used only for storage. I can still see the long shelves suspended on wires from the rafters, as a protection from mice. Among other things these shelves contained the year’s supply of flour, which was milled from wheat grown on the farm and taken to a mill 17 miles away.

The south room on the ground floor is the kitchen, dining, and living room combined. The bedroom faces the north, with one window on the north wall and one on the east. I am sleeping in a crib facing the north window. I awaken sometime in the night and am aware of being very, very cold and that an icy, gusty wind is beating snow against the window panes and am conscious for the first time of a real Kansas blizzard.¹

My own childhood memory begins nearly five decades later, and it shows a relatively modern seven-room house with electricity and indoor plumbing. The power came from a bank of six-volt batteries stored in the milk house and charged by a one-cylinder gasoline engine. It was enough to light a single weak bulb in each room and power the radio. The bathroom, built by my father in his late bachelor days, contained a flush toilet and a tub whose water source was a well situated in a draw halfway between the house and barn. A windmill pumped the water to a storage tank in the barn loft, which provided enough elevation to create water pressure for the house. This water supplied the bathtub, the toilet and the kitchen sink. Drinking water came from a well next to the house. We used a hand pump to fill an oaken bucket that we kept on the kitchen counter with a dipper for drinking. Today, we call that kind of living off the grid, but in rural Kansas of the early 20th century, the power grid had not yet been built.

Two stoves lined the north wall of the Meyer kitchen. The larger one burned wood for winter cooking and heating, and the small kerosene stove was used for preparing summer meals. A pail of dried corncobs was kept handy for kindling. There was a pass-through serving bar to the dining room with china cabinets above. A hand-cranked telephone and a foot-powered sewing machine decorated the far wall of the dining room, which opened to a spacious living room containing a pot-bellied wood stove, a piano, a library table stocked with Dr. Elliot’s five-foot shelf of Harvard Classics, and a Morris chair whose reclining back adjusted with a rod that fit into grooves at the rear of its wooden arms. A hollow footstool contained playing cards and a cribbage board. The ground-floor bedroom had doors to both the living room and a short hallway leading to the bathroom, kitchen, and the stairs to the second floor. The fourth and last-built bedroom was above the living room and was large enough to sleep four.

Jacob and Matilda Meyer had eight children in the 22 years from 1884 to 1906, and the house comfortably held them all. That was not the case with my mother’s family. William and Zelda Mae Morrison had six children in nine years and raised them in a two-bedroom house a few miles to the east, in Linn Township. I’m not sure how they managed it. The two small bedrooms each had a double bed flush against an interior wall. There was a day bed suitable for one person in the living room, and the enclosed back porch contained a manual cream separator and an iron double bed.

The original owner of the land had built dirt-floored living space in below-ground rooms, accessible on the east side, and perhaps those were still habitable, although by the 1930s they were used only to keep food cool in the summer and to frighten small boys with tales of ghosts. A small bathroom with a tub was located off the kitchen, but water had to be carried to it from an indoor pitcher pump that retrieved captured rainwater from a cistern.

At night, the house was lit with a few kerosene lamps carried from room to room, and the toilet was an outhouse in the far backyard, beyond the chicken house. Life was harder there, especially in the winters when keeping warm and putting food on the table were constant concerns. In 1912, Mae’s sixth and last child, my aunt Velma, was born, and my grandmother required an extended stay in the Topeka State Hospital, which provided custodial care for the mentally ill. Her sister, Carrie Lobaugh, moved in and took care of the baby in that period. My maternal grandfather, William Morrison, had a short temper and in 1921, when he tried to enforce discipline with a razor strap, his oldest son, 18-year-old Howard, ran down the road and disappeared. Both families had their mysteries to ponder, and for the Morrisons, it was Howard and his fate.

But I was always glad to visit either farm. My grandfather Morrison died in 1933, but my grandmother would flourish and live to see me graduate from college and marry. When I was small, her two bachelor sons Wilmer and Ernie ran the farm with vigor and good humor. Wilmer was primarily in charge of the home place while Ernie had his own farm to look after a few miles away. They both had musical talent and the Scots-Irish wit. Wilmer liked to perform daring physical feats. The family album includes a photo of him doing a handstand on top of the chimney that topped the Morrison farmhouse. Another shows him doing the same thing on a tractor seat. He evidently thought I was a wimpy kid, because he kept talking me into trying daring things such as climbing the silo, walking across Willow Creek while balanced on a bridge rail, riding an untrained horse. I somehow avoided injury.

Ernie was the storyteller, and he invented elaborate ghost stories based on a specific family of monsters that he called Skagg-ags. A deserted house, of which there were many in Washington County, was a Skagg-ag house. The fourth brother, Ellis, was a traveling salesman, and would drop by our house for philosophical discussions. One that sticks in my mind was about Lecomte du Nouy’s 1947 book Human Destiny, which attempted to reconcile science and religion. Ellis’s son and granddaughter would earn the first PhDs in the Morrison family.

On the Meyer place, the bachelor farmer who kept things going was Lester, nicknamed Pappy. His Swiss-German stolidity masked a competent and caring nature. Both Wilmer and Pappy lived their entire lives on the farms where they were born.

The changing economics of farming worked in the bachelor farmers’ favor. Mechanization let them scale up their operations, and, when the siblings departed, the land had fewer people to support. After the war, the Rural Electric Administration brought full electrical power to the prairie. But Washington County fell steadily in population, from nearly 22,000 at the start of the 20th century to 6,483 at its close. I can remember driving through Strawberry Township with my father while he pointed out the places, two or three in nearly every mile, where there had been a farmhouse when he was a boy and now was only field and pasture.

2. World War I and its effects

O ne source of Jacob Meyer’s early affluence was his skill at judging cattle. He made money by buying promising calves, feeding them and selling them after they had grown enough for their worth to become apparent to less skilled eyes. He knew that the economics of farming would change, and his children would need other means of earning a living, and so he invested far more in their education than was common for early 20 th century farm families. The entry-level profession for that generation of country people was teaching, and Jacob and Matilda sent their sons and daughters to what was then called the Kansas State Normal College at Emporia. The name came from the French école normale, a school to set standards or norms for education, and it was changed to Kansas State Teachers’ College in 1923. (Today, it is Emporia State University.) Tuition was free to Kansas residents.

In 1913, five Meyer children went off to Emporia, and Jacob rented a house for them. Its youngest resident was my father, Elmer E. Bige Meyer. (The nickname came from one of the first words he ever spoke: an abbreviation of the Old Testament name belonging to a Strawberry Township neighbor, Abijah.) Bige and his sister Mamie attended the Kansas State Normal High School. Their older siblings Fred, Walt and Ollie attended the college. The 1914 yearbook Sunflower lists Bige as high school junior and class treasurer. He was 17, and, with all that family support, his future was promising, but it would not turn out as planned. In Europe, the guns of August were about to speak.

Elmer Bige Meyer, Emporia, 1915

Bige played football at Normal High, was graduated in the spring of 1915 and entered the college the following fall. He joined a local fraternity, Kappa Sigma Epsilon. For unknown reasons, he dropped out the second semester, perhaps to help with spring planting, but came back for the fall of 1916 while President Woodrow Wilson was running for re-election on the campaign slogan, He kept us out of war. The spring of 1917 found Bige enrolled in business law, advanced stenography, penmanship methods, composition and rhetoric, and physical training practice.

The United States had only a small standing army on April 6, the day that Congress finally declared war on Germany, and mobilization in Kansas was primarily through the National Guard. Every one of the Kappa Sigma Epsilon brothers walked down to the Emporia guard headquarters to volunteer, and my father was inducted on April 10. His transcript shows that he received credit for that spring’s courses except for physical training and composition and rhetoric. His other education was about to begin.

The Kansas and Missouri National Guard units were reorganized as their own Army division, the 35th, and went to Camp Doniphan, adjacent to Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma, to be trained in artillery and trench warfare. There were 24.068 soldiers, more than 14,000 from Missouri and nearly 10,000 from Kansas. They were good men, but, when they got overseas, their officers made some tragic mistakes. What happened to them has been chronicled by Indiana University historian Robert H. Ferrell. ² A view from the ground is preserved in my father’s letters home.

The first is from somewhere in England.

June 5, 1918: After a long time, I have finally gotten overseas. We landed here in England yesterday and came to a real camp, getting here early this morning. I had a very good trip over. I had a good boat, quite speedy for a transport, and the weather was fine all the way. I got thru without getting seasick, but I am not in love with that form of riding. I have not caught up with the company yet, but getting closer all the time. We did not have any thrilling escapes from submarines on the way over but came through without much excitement.

I have not seen much of England yet, only what I saw from the train as we came up here last night, but as much as I have seen of it has been mighty pretty. It looks pretty crowded up though after coming from a place where we have so much room. The villages are close together and although the houses are all good they are all just alike and jammed up close together and right up against the street so there are no lawns. The farmhouses are all good and all had beautiful little gardens and lawns around them.

I don’t think I would want much to farm here though as the little dinky fields would get on my nerves. Young men seem to be pretty scarce around, but I never saw so many kids in my life. It is a lot colder here than it is back in the states, and the days are mighty long. It doesn’t get dark until about 10:30, and it gets light before 4 in the morning. I haven’t any idea of how long we will be here or where we will go from here, but I suppose that we will go to some training camp before long. …

When the Missouri-Kansas division reached France, its men spent some time with British troops in the Somme region, in the northwest corner of France, which had been the scene of a major battle two years earlier. That line had stabilized by then, and it was used to teach the American soldiers some of the elements of trench warfare. Then the division traveled to the eastern end of the country where the French were holding down the line in Alsace.

June 19, 1918: We have been moving pretty steadily ever since we left the States, only stopping a couple of times to rest. We are billeted now in a little French village and I have a mighty small idea as to where it is other than it is somewhere in France. We hiked here yesterday from the railroad. It took us about 8 hours to get here and come through about a dozen little villages every one of them just the same. The houses all look as though they were at least a dozen years old and the barn and house are all together and the streets are lined with manure piles. There are no people left here except a few old men and women and a few kids. The railroads in this country are wonders for slowness especially the troop trains. I was lucky in getting to ride second-class as about ¾ of the men on the train rode in their combination boxcars and cattle cars. The cars are lot smaller than ours and nearly every boxcar has written up by the door 8 horses or 40 men. I am still following that company and sort of doubt whether I will ever catch up with them or not. I do not think that we will stay at this village long but expect that we will move up further. I don’t know exactly, but as near as I can find out we are somewhere between 80 and 100 miles back of the trenches so of course we will probably go closer for training.

It is still much cooler here than it was in the States, and I can hardly see how stuff grows as well as it does. Garden tracts seem to do unusually well, and fruit looks good. A lot of the road that we came over yesterday has cherry trees on either side of the road and the cherries are most all ripe and a lot of them have been picked already. Strawberries are pretty thick here and they are mighty fine. Well, it is nearly time for chow so I better get my mess pan and get up to the kitchen. I will write again as soon as I get time.

When his unit reached Alsace, the assignment was to relieve French forces for duty in the more hard-pressed lines to the west. As Bige saw it:

When we took it over, the French and Germans had sort of mutual understanding that that was to be kept a quiet sector and were free in showing themselves and got along without any fighting. We livened it up a little as we were all raring to get our Germans, and we would crack down on whatever showed up like it might be Jerry and made a few short advances just to straighten out the line a little.

He spent his 22nd birthday there.

July 11, 1918: We just came back from the front and are resting up now and getting cleaned up a little. We were up there quite a while, and so far I haven’t seen a German, but of course this happens to be a pretty quiet front that we are on. It wasn’t half bad in the trenches, and it was really a lot better than I thought it would be. But it seems pretty good to get back and to get a bath and some clean clothes and a good long night’s sleep. We get enough sleep when we are up on the line, but it is on the two or three hours at a time plan …

I had lost all track of dates and didn’t realize that this was my birthday until I began trying to find out the date this morning and then I found out that I was a year older than I thought I was. I suppose that the wheat harvest is all over by now back there and it is hotter than a million. That is one thing that hasn’t bothered me in the least here. It has been cool and pretty comfortable all the time.

American forces began moving toward their first major assignment of the war in August, 1918. They surrounded a bulge in the line that the Germans had held since 1914 near the town of St. Mihiel. Their mission was to get ready to push the Germans back. General John J. Pershing did not want to risk losing his first battle, and so he assigned his most experienced divisions for the fighting, and the 35th was held in reserve. The attack on the St. Mihiel salient would come on Sept. 12.

Sept. 9, 1918: We have one hitch in the trenches to our credit so far, but while we were in the front line, it was really but little more than part of our training.

For the last month, we have done little but drill occasionally and do a little work and stay in reserve. As for what is going on over here in the war, we know but very little what is going on as we do not get to see a newspaper only once in a while and then we can’t follow it as we have missed too much. We get a little that is going on in our own sector, but we hear so much that can’t believe much of that. But one thing we know, and that is things look mighty good for us and while we figure on being here quite a while yet, we’ve got our minds made up to see the scenery along the Rhine before many moons.

Speaking of scenery, we have sure seen it. All summer we have been in places that were before the war some of the places where many of our rich Americans came to spend summer. But viewed from our infantrymen’s point of view it lost a great deal of its beauty and made them all wish for the straight and level roads of the states. The roads here are really wonderful, and so far I haven’t seen any dirt roads since I have been over here, and I have seen a lot of roads, too.

This company is certainly some hiking company now. We have made believers out of everything in this battalion, and the battalion made believers out of the division in a little 60-mile hike a few months ago. It is remarkable to see how far a bunch can hike on a little pride and guts. We had some men, and quite a few of them, too, who were in the habit of falling out in every hike, short or long, until one night when we had to make about 20 miles in a rain and dark as pitch. Nobody but the guide knew where we were, so it happened that L came through without losing a man, and that made us sort of proud of ourselves as some companies lost as high as 50% of their men. Since then, a man sure catches hell if he goes to crabbing and talking about falling out, and I have seen a lot of them and have had to do it myself a couple of times, come in on pure guts. These rock roads are hard on a man’s feet with a good pack. I have the pleasure now of dragging around a Chauchat automatic rifle, and it only weighs 19 lbs. But it is a mighty nice little tool up on the front line.

In fact, the Americans would soon realize that the French-made Chauchat was a really bad tool. Pershing’s army had arrived in France without automatic weapons or field artillery, and so it purchased equipment from the French. The Chauchat had a barrel that was too small for its ammunition, causing the gun to overheat and fail after only a few rounds. But that was not a major problem at St. Mihiel, because the Germans were already withdrawing when the Americans attacked, and the main fighting lasted only a day.

Pershing then moved his troops 60 miles west for a much more difficult assignment, capturing the territory between the Argonne Forest on the left and the Meuse River on the right. The troops moved at night to keep the Germans believing that the American attack would come at heavily fortified Metz, southeast of Verdun. The 35th Division was assigned to a sector immediately to the east of the forest, whose density provided plenty of cover for the German defenders.

Oct. 6, 1918: I suppose that you have been waiting to hear from me for quite (a while), but this is absolutely the first chance I have had to send mail since the last short note I wrote you. Much has happened to me since then, not to me so much as I have been where things were happening nearly ever since then.

First and of most importance is that I have been over the top and have come back unhurt. How I came thru, I do not know as I was in several places where chances seemed pretty small. I will try to tell you about my experiences and hope that it goes thru all right.

One night about 12 o’clock, we left our position back of the lines and went up to the front line where we stood around in the muddy trenches (and) rested as best we could. About 2 o’clock, our artillery opened up and began to bombard the Boche, and they gave him a good one. About daylight, we moved down into a little shallow front-line trench where we laid low for a little while, and the artillery was putting over a terrific barrage.

Then just before the zero hour arrived and as our barrage was lifting, our machine guns began playing over Jerry’s trenches just to keep him low. The machine